Don't worry that someone might pirate your game. If it's good enough they will. DRM should be the last thing on your mind. 

What you should be worried about (besides making a good game) is how your customers will find your game and buy it. How will you collect feedback from players and communicate news and distribute updates. 

It's possible to do all that without Steam or any other service, of course. It's just that Steam makes all that and more effortless for you. I'm not a game developer, but it seems challenging enough without writing your own distribution software. 

And those decisions made by individuals add up. Because if they didn't, piracy wouldn't be a big deal. So yes, I'd suggest a true understanding of the loss of justifiable revenue to companies who count upon it to make games could make a difference. At the very least it would get people who steal games to at least think about what they're doing, and whom their behavior is affecting.

And me, too. I don't see how a person of moral principles can justify stealing a game. Unless they've split their minds in half. We humans are very ingenious about working out all sorts of justifications for such things, of course.

Stardock does have more "face" than just about any mid-sized game developer I can think of, though they're not alone in pursuing this course. And I agree: it's the sense that a company has real people working in a real environment, making games, that gets around the strange idea some kiddies have that they're somehow taking part in a grand revolt against the Powers of the Universe by stealing a game. When you reduce it to the level of a person's family that gets an income from coding, a very different picture emerges.